SAN FRANCISCO — Someday, swarms of satellites the size of a tissue box will be snapping pictures, taking environmental readings and broadcasting messages from orbit — but the entities controlling those satellites won't be governments.

Instead, they'll be hard-core hobbyists and elementary-school students, entrepreneurs and hacktivists. In short, anyone who can afford a few hundred dollars to send something to the final frontier.

The technological for this outer-space revolution already exists: It's a type of satellite known as a CubeSat, which measures just 4 inches (10 centimeters) on a side. The CubeSat phenomenon started out as an educational experiment, but now it's turning into a crowdsourcing, crowdfunding movement of Kickstarter proportions. And not even the sky is the limit.

This year alone, more than two dozen CubeSats are due to go into orbit, piggybacking on commercial and government space launches.

"We had no idea CubeSats would go so far," Jordi Puig-Suari, an engineering professor at Cal Poly who is considered one of the inventors of the CubeSat concept, told NBC News in an email. "We were trying to develop a better system to educate students, and we did succeed at that. ... But we also created a whole new space ecosystem that we could not imagine at the time."